Law and Order

by Uhnak, Dorothy

  “What I really came by for was to give you something, Dad.” He turned and Patrick held his silver patrolman’s shield in his right hand, extended it. “End of a family tradition. From grandfather to father to son and right back to you.” For one brief moment, Patrick’s voice went low and sad and a little self-mocking. “The dumb thing is, I really liked being a cop. I didn’t realize it. I just went on the job because it was just assumed I would, but for a time, in some ways, I liked being a cop.” He shook his head abruptly and his voice tightened. “But now, hell, I’m gonna lean back and watch how you real professionals handle things. You’ll handle the publicity and the committee hearings and the grand jury investigations and everything else, and by the time you’re finished with it, the dead black professor will probably end up the leader of an underground movement to kill all cops caught on the street at three A.M. And Johnnie Morrison will probably make second grade and you’ll keep the Department under wraps.”

  When Brian didn’t reach for the shield, Patrick tossed it on the table beside the decanter and said in a soft, mocking voice, “Should I skip the traditional, or should I tell you to shove it up your ass?”

  He hit Patrick across the mouth with the back of his hand, not hard, not even unexpectedly. Patrick nodded as though they had completed a transaction, sealed a bargain, brought things to an inevitable conclusion, then he turned and Brian heard him exchange a few quick soft words with his mother before he left the house.

  Kevin O’Malley’s light-blue eyes searched his brother’s face furtively, as though to find secrets which were always denied to him. He was always tense and eager around Brian and the damn gnawing ulcer bit into his gut like a rodent. He tried not to gulp the drink down straight, first because he didn’t want Brian to see how badly he needed it and secondly because it went straight to the raw spot in his duodenum.

  Brian didn’t waste any time on small talk; there was no family stuff, no how are the kids, or have you been in touch with Mom lately. He just led Kevin into the massive room, poured out the drinks, gestured his brother into a chair, sat opposite him, leaned close and said in a thick, strange voice, “I need a job done.”

  “Jesus, Brian, anything. Name it and you got it.”

  It was the first time Brian had ever come to him. There had been times, over the years, when he had had to come to Brian, when Brian had bailed him out, smoothed things over, covered things up. Kevin O’Malley was a good cop, one of the Department’s best investigators, which surprised even himself; he had a depth of patient perseverance which made him one of the most effective arson detectives in the history of the Department. But that hadn’t always been his strong point; in the early days, the unmellow years, Kevin O’Malley’s reputation was built on his hair-trigger temper, his quick, impulsive, physical reaction to a situation. Through the years, it had earned him both commendations and reprimands. Once or twice, without Brian’s intervention, it might have gotten him into serious legal difficulties.

  It had been a long time since Kevin O’Malley had gotten out of line but he was always slightly awed by his brother’s position in the Department. He finally gave in to the impulse, downed the Scotch, noted then how bad his brother looked: Christ, like an all-night drunk, his eyes shot to hell, his hand trembling.

  Finally, Brian said, “Kevin, I want to get a guy. I want to get him really good, all boxed in.”

  Kevin’s mind raced wildly, could latch on nowhere; they were too far removed from each other’s experience, no one came to mind, nothing. He pressed the glass tightly into the palm of his hands and waited.

  “This guy Johnnie Morrison.”

  Kevin bit his lip, narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. “Guy involved in the shooting last night? Guy that killed the nigger that killed his partner?”

  “What I want you to do,” Brian said without explanation, “is to find someone who will swear on his mother’s grave that the gun that killed Morrison’s partner was his. That Johnnie Morrison took it off him for a throwaway.”

  Kevin let his breath out softly between his parted teeth in a whistling sound. He turned the words over in his quick, agile brain. There was nothing incomprehensible, nothing outside the realm of possibility; in twenty-two years, he’d seen it all, knew anything could happen; knew that Brian must have his reasons.

  He couldn’t resist asking, “You going after this Morrison for murder?”

  Brian shook his head and held his hand up. “Don’t worry about it. You just get me some mother-fucking pusher who’s got a score to settle with Johnnie Morrison. That’s all I want from you. Make sure he’s good. I got special plans for Johnnie Morrison and the less you know about it the better.”

  Kevin considered the cold, hard, evaluating glaze of his brother’s eyes and nodded once. He pressed his hand against his burning side, then offered it to Brian for a hard, quick shake. “Count on me, Bri.”

  “I am counting on you, Kevin.”

  He watched himself on the late news; watched and listened dispassionately to the smoothly professional way he avoided direct answers to very direct and probing questions. He dozed for a while, heard Mary Ellen beside him in the bed move, reach for the control switch.

  “Shall I rum the TV off, Brian? I thought you fell asleep.”

  “No. No, leave it on for a while. Ill sleep in a while.”

  She turned, curled beside him, went back to sleep instantly, the way a child does. He adjusted his pillow so that he had a better view of the TV set. His mind drifted, filled with too many thoughts to focus on anything, and then he heard her clear, crisp, professional voice.

  “Good evening. This is Karen Day.” Pause, dramatic effect; catch their attention. She’d explained it all to him; whatever he’d thought natural was contrived. There was nothing—no pause, no inflection, no gesture, no expression—that wasn’t carefully planned. End of pause, announcement: “And this...is your city.” Pan on New York; music carrying up and down city streets, through crowds of people, past buildings; the whole spectrum of introduction.

  She seemed more vivid on color television than in life. Her lips were redder, fuller; her hair was blacker; her eyes shone with reflected lights and some special eye drops she used to gain just that effect. She faced the viewer directly, unwaveringly. He recognized the red blouse over which she’d knotted a red-white-and-blue scarf with casual elegance. It was flipped over one shoulder; just the right touch.

  “I have no guest on my show tonight,” Karen Day said carefully, her voice filled with portent. “The guest who was supposed to appear with me tonight is dead. He was killed last night. He was a policeman. His name was Peter Caputo, and according to the New York City Police Department, Patrolman Peter Caputo was killed in the line of duty. Heroically. And so he will be given an inspector’s funeral, which is the way the Police Department pays final respects to its heroes. And he was a hero. I don’t know about what happened last night, but however he died, Peter Caputo was a real hero in the way he lived.” Her long hand fondled a lock of hair, shoved it from her face. “Patrolman Caputo was coming to this show to reveal corruption within the Department he served so well.”

  Brian felt an electric shock wave jolt the length of his body, then surge full force into his brain. Jesus Christ Almighty. Two things, separately, hit him: First, Caputo had gone to her, was planning to take his charges into the public arena; second, she was using it.

  He could hardly distinguish her words anymore; it was hardly necessary. The impact was what overwhelmed him; she was doing it, really doing it.

  “...I had spoken to Peter Caputo several times before he convinced me that he was indeed aware of a fantastic amount of corruption within the Department and that...”

  He watched her mouth, was fascinated by the false electronic mouth. He caught a glimpse of white teeth, was aware of the familiar gesture when she flicked the edge of her scarf between long, slender fingers. He was fascinated by the strangeness of her long, lovely, familiar face; he thought of her long and elegant
body, which had been so giving and had so delighted in taking. He watched her as though she was part of a remote dream which never had been part of his reality. Karen.

  “...and so the New York City Police Department and its highest-ranking officers will have a lot of investigating and a lot of explaining to do before we can be satisfied that we have been given the true story of the deaths of Patrolman Peter Caputo and of Professor Martin Osmond.”

  The telephone rang even before she signed off the air. He hit the remote control, watched Karen get swallowed into a tiny white circle and disappear.

  Arthur Pollack in his thin, sore voice said, “Brian, I just watched the Karen Day show. What the hell is going on?”

  He hunched over the match, inhaled quickly before he answered. “Arthur, will you give me about two days?” Then, suddenly and totally aware of the urgent need he felt, the need to take things into hand, to get things under his control, he said with undisguised passion, “Arthur, will you trust me for a couple of days?”

  “Brian, Brian. I’d trust you forever, but I’m being kept in the dark about too many things and that I don’t like. The Commissioner’s probably trying to get me right now and I wanted to talk first to you and then to Aaron Levine before the Man reaches me.”

  “Arthur,” Brian said carefully, “don’t call Levine.”

  There was a silence and Brian could picture the worried face, gray, thin; turned-in eyes seeking answers. He heard a long deep sigh, filled almost with a shudder, as though Arthur had been punched in the stomach while in the act of exhaling.

  “Brian,” Arthur Pollack said finally, “for God’s sake, don’t leave me stranded.”

  “I won’t, Chief,” Brian said. And meant it.

  It was three-thirty in the morning and he let his gaze wander over the dimly lit room: the old man’s room. It was odd but that was the way Brian always thought of the study. Patrick Crowley owned the room, filled it with his presence even though he’d been dead for nearly twenty years.

  Brian nodded as though in final acknowledgment and admiration. The shrewd old son of a bitch had been right; he’d always known the score, the way to get things done. Any goddamn way that would work and that was the only criterion.

  There had been, throughout his career, great advantages in being Patrick Crowley’s son-in-law but Brian never doubted that most of his accomplishments were his own. He knew who he was and what he was capable of; Crowley provided the opportunities but he’d always come through on his own efforts. And he’d paid a price too. Being Patrick Crowley’s son-in-law.

  Mary Ellen Crowley, his beautiful doll-like wife, had felt dishonored by the act of sex from the very beginning. More, worse, she felt that she dishonored God. Night after night, she had steeled herself against what she considered an act of sacrilege. Christ, it had been hard. The tears, the actual physical revulsion she’d felt. The clenching of her small fists, rigid at her sides; the final agonized and agonizing submission. He’d tried. He’d really tried, but something indelible had been engraved on her very bones. Her real avocation had been the terrible Crowley-daughter tradition of virgin nunhood.

  During the years of their wartime separation, he’d tested himself on more women than he could remember, had felt his manhood assert and reassert itself as something more than animalistic and shameful and repulsive. Yet, on his return, it was to Mary Ellen, no more mature, no more willing or understanding; only more willingly submissive and suffering in silence and totally, ignorantly, hopelessly unaware of the massive insult her submission caused her husband.

  They worked it out through the years of their marriage. She submitted with some slightly better grace; he made fewer and fewer sexual demands on her as he found other women more and more accessible.

  His son, Patrick, resulted from what was nearly an act of rape, a passion of anger and despair and self-hatred and hatred for her for making him feel ashamed of his natural lust.

  He wondered, sometimes, what the old man knew or suspected. It wasn’t an area ever to be discussed or approached. The old man seemed satisfied with life when his grandson was born; he made out a will with Patrick Brian O’Malley as his sole heir but his worldly possessions amounted to a few small properties. His heir would never inherit his true wealth: power and the knowledge of how to garner that power and use it.

  That had been Brian’s inheritance: “Take care of yourself at all times, Brian,” the old man had counseled. “Make sure you always have the upper hand because, for the love of God, you never know.”

  Brian thought about Ed Shea and felt the pain of loss, the emptiness of sudden, unanticipated death. They’d grown in the job together; they’d been friends for all these years and it was incomprehensible to him that he’d never known Ed Shea beyond the surface of his skin.

  Tomorrow, he’d confront Ed Shea and force him out of the Department. He’d had the evidence for more than ten years. It was funny, odd, strange, cold-blooded, the way he’d remembered the old man’s words, and without any thought process at all, he’d gotten the upper hand on Ed without Ed ever knowing about it and without feeling the slightest qualm. Brian considered quietly that the reason he hadn’t experienced any guilt was that he’d never envisioned himself ever, for any reason, under any circumstance, using what he had on Ed, so that made the having excusable.

  Ed Shea took two examinations for the rank of captain in the New York City Police Department. Many men took the examination more than once and there was nothing wrong with that in and of itself. What was wrong, in Ed Shea’s case, was that he took two examinations at the same time. The first, the official examination paper, was graded a failure and certain measures were taken, secret, illegal measures, and Ed Shea was given a second paper to fill out with the help of some textbooks and some good advice. This second paper, which received a very high score, was then substituted for the original, failing paper.

  Brian O’Malley had photostatic copies of both of these examination papers. He had come into possession of them through a lifetime of careful placing of loyalties and favors and accumulated knowledge of the actions of certain strategically placed people who were glad to advise him of certain potentially useful situations.

  Brian’s eyes closed but he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep anymore this night. Reluctantly, inevitably, finally, he thought of his father. Buried for a hero, killed by a whore. Unmanned by a whore.

  The Department had closed ranks, protected his father and his mother and himself and his brothers and sisters and all of his family. It was an action to be expected. Take care of your own because, Christ knows, nobody else will. And because they had all been men too and the thought had always been close to the surface: There but for the grace of God. For all of its collective faults, Brian O’Malley loved the Department as much as he loved his family. He would protect the Department as much as he could, in any way he could, but he would also clean it up as best he could. In any way he could.

  He leaned his aching head back against the chair and thought of all the things he had to do, all the people he had to get, all the wheeling and dealing he had to accomplish.

  Christ, wouldn’t it be great if he could bring it all out into the open, call a murderer a murderer and a thief a thief and a betrayer a betrayer? All clean and open, the way his son thought it should be. But Brian knew that nothing could be accomplished that way. Absolutely nothing.

  He felt the waves of exhaustion across his forehead and way deep along the crown of his skull, and when he exhaled, a sound very much like a sob came from Brian’s throat, or deeper, from his chest. The sound surprised him, seemed to drain and empty him.

  And then he filled with a strange, calm sense of wonder at his lack of anger. All the years of his youth, he’d been trying to live up to an image of a man who never even existed, had been a myth, a fiction. There was something comforting in finally knowing that his father had been an imperfect human being like everyone else. Just before drifting into a deep, short, dreamless sleep, he wished tha
t his son could accept him for what he was too.

  FORTY-THREE

  IT TOOK KEVIN O’MALLEY less than twenty-four careful discreet hours to come up with Juan Jesus Rodriguez. He noted in the arrest record that Rodriguez was due for sentencing on Morrison’s arrest within three weeks. An additional, heavier narcotics rap in the interim could send the bum away for fifteen to twenty years.

  Kevin located his man without much difficulty. They were creatures of habit, this breed. They hung out in certain locations, they didn’t wander too far, stayed where they felt familiar and reasonably safe, among their own kind. At 2 A.M., Kevin took him in the hallway of the tenement where Rodriguez lived. Startled, the slightly built man thought at first that he was being mugged. He threw his hands into the air, swallowed a cry of fright with a gasp, offered himself without resistance as though to purchase mercy.

  Then, in the dimness, his small, shrewd dart eyes saw Kevin O’Malley’s policeman face, recognized with certain hard knowledge that he was once again in the hands of the police and he was literally terrified of what this unknown one might want of him.

  Johnnie Morrison, impeccably dressed in a navy blazer with brass buttons, expensive turtle-neck sweater, dark-gray slacks, carefully flicked a speck of dust from his sleeve and by his every studied gesture showed distaste for his surroundings. He was deliberate about showing absolutely nothing else; not apprehension, not even curiosity, just calm, respectful if somewhat disdainful interest in whatever it was that Deputy Chief Inspector Brian O’Malley was up to.

  Morrison received the telephone call in the middle of a deep and erotic dream and he regretted the interruption. The Chief said abruptly and without explanation that he was to come to this location, a dingy dump of a trucking office on the West Side. The Chief specified he was to arrive within thirty-five minutes and Johnnie Morrison, always careful, made it on time.